Cult Studs

Okay, we need a little amusement to cheer us up after hearing the news about the pope. Although some people are pointing out that it’s good news really: that it’s the Vatican shooting itself in the foot, that now people will realize how authoritarian it is after all. But I don’t know – I’m never very convinced by that kind of thing. Partly because it never seems to happen. People seem so happy to say ‘Oh how sweet, a nice authoritarian pope again.’

So we could do with a laugh. I know I could. I’m wrestling with revisions, and I’m finding this patch a struggle. Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, I’m having to drag them out by force, one at a time. I much prefer it when I get an idea and just re-write a page or two in one go. But on the other hand, I can always cheer myself up enormously by reflecting that I’m not having to revise such utter unmitigated bollocks as this:

What I will focus on here is Butler’s critique in Precarious Life of Georgio Agamben’s concept of the “homo sacer,” or “bare life,” which identifies the discursive limits of the Foucauldian concept of power as the sovereign exception over biopolitical life. I will argue that Butler, whose concept of the performative subject presupposes power to be the totalizing ground by which human subjects are made intelligible, perhaps unfairly rejects Agamben’s critique. His critique of power, I will argue, is much more in dialogue with Butler than she seems to allow, and arguably raises the stakes of Butlerian identity politics by illuminating the possibility that certain political subjects can be – in fact are necessarily, according to Agamben – erased entirely from biopower relations, or humanity itself, through what Agamben calls the sovereign exception over biopolitical human life.

Good stuff, don’t you think? Notice, just for one thing, how the hapless reviewer uses the identical emptily pompous phrase – ‘the sovereign exception over biopolitical human life’ – twice in the space of two sentences. (Okay not absolutely identical – he adds a word in the second appearance.) But notice more, oh so much more, the way the vocabulary is used as a little invisible pump to inflate some very obvious ideas into something that is meant to sound – like more than that. Like a great deal more than that. Wouldn’t you think people would eventually stop doing this kind of thing? Because people like me see them doing it and point it out and laugh raucously? Wouldn’t you think they would, some day, finally, embarrass themselves? I would. But they don’t. Why is that?

Judith Butler later clarifies Foucault’s theory of power, expanding upon its merely implied strategies for subjective resistance to dominant technologies of power and making the important intervention that subjectivity is not just an expression of the “top down” subjugation of an “individual” but is intrinsically performative. The performative subject is both inaugurated by power relations and at the same time is constantly recreating its discursive, epistemological law in dangerously supplemental, disruptive ways. Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford UP 1997) explores in depth what she, after Foucault, sees as the total immersion of the subject in power relations without recourse to an originary “individuality” or essentialized political identity who exists prior to the subject’s inauguration into power.

Right? Right.

Butler’s conceptualization of post-structuralist identity politics, like Foucault’s, relies on a presupposition of “power” as the matrix of intelligibility, or ground by and through which biopolitical subjectivity is inaugurated and “exists.” This grounding in power, for Butler, extends to the very body of the subject. Recent criticism of Foucault’s concept of power by Georgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford 1995), however, convincingly argues that power indeed has an outside – namely its “sovereign exception” over what Agamben calls “bare life,” or the homo sacer.

And so on. It’s all like that. None of it is any different. It’s all the same. It starts like that, and it goes on like that, and it goes on like that some more, and it ends like that. Somebody – a guy named Don Moore, in fact, a nice wholesome name, sounds like a baseball player – wrote it like that, presumably on purpose. Maybe it’s a parody. Only I doubt it, because if it were a parody, it would probably be a lot better, so as not to give the game away. It would be much less repetitive, for one thing. The baseball player is a graduate student in English and ‘Cultural Studies.’ I was just being abusive about the phrase ‘Cultural Studies’ in conversation with my colleague a couple of hours ago, and that was before I read the bottom of this review where it tells us that the writer of it is in ‘Cultural Studies.’ I already hated the very phrase (I have that reaction that Goebbels talked about, you know the one). Now I hate it even more.

I can’t resist. Do you think Don Moore could be a pseudonym for Jeremy Stribling’s gobbledegook-generator? And thank you for writing the only headline on the new pope to tell it like it is (“Oh Hooray, it’s the Scary One”). A few years ago I happened on Ratzinger’s fan page (down right now, either for overhauling or too many hits, but I refreshed my memory from the Google cache) and am a little ashamed to recall how long it took me to understand that it really wasn’t intended as parody. We shouldn’t have to wait too long to see how he performs in office; they may have intended him merely as a legacy-solidifier, but he knows he may not have long to leave his mark. I am certainly finding it difficult to reconcile his “humble” act with the fact that he knows millions of people now accept him as a divine mouthpiece. But then I suppose many of us might find it hard to resist mouthing off inanities if put in such a position, if only to see the millions jump at our every silly word. That could make a nice competition: what new nonsense would you inflict on your flock if you were suddenly made pope?

No, Merlijn, I’m not absolutely sure it’s not churned out by the bot. But I think it probably isn’t! Because of where it appears, and because this kind of thing is so like the kind of thing it is. It seems robotic, but then so do thousands of others that are (in some strained sense) genuine.

My pleasure, Stewart. I’ve had a special feeling about Ratzinger ever since doing a N&C a few weeks or months ago on some piece of wisdom he issued about what women should be doing. It would have gone down nicely in a 13th century tavern, perhaps, but it seems just a tiny bit wrong-headed and oppressive now.

Oh and it was Goering was it! I’m surprised. I’ve been attributing it to the skinny propagandist for years – I suppose because it sounds like a propagandist kind of thing to say, rather than an Air Marshall kind of thing to say. But there is always one’s leisure hours, of course.

Yes, I recall that pronouncement on women very well. It seemed to cause a little stir at the time and maybe some felt relief when it turned out to be “only” Ratzinger on the pope’s behalf, rather than the pope himself. I’m sure someone will publicly resurrect that issue now (some things can be resurrected, just not the ones Ratzinger claims). If the general impression I’m getting from various media outlets is not too inaccurate, he seems not to enjoy a concensus even among Catholics. Clearly, all those who joined in the mass-hysteria of love for John Paul II at the time of the funeral wanted to be every bit as euphoric over the choice of successor. The fact that it’s Ratzinger seems to be making that a rather tall order for some.

An afterthought: you probably didn’t have this in mind when you wrote “I wonder what Ratzinger thinks of Cultural Studies,” but there is something extraordinarily appropriate about the remark. There is room for comparing the church’s insistence on Latin only as a tool for keeping the masses ignorant and subservient with the mumbo-jumbo language in Cultural Studies and most post-modernist claptrap. They are both intended to dominate by making the listener or reader feel inadequate and both masquerade as quite the opposite of what they are. The church claims to be about mercy, salvation, forgiveness etc, while the academic version of “we have all the answers and nobody else does” claims to be exposing that everyone else’s truth is merely power play, while doing precisely that itself through its (mis)use of language.

You have to be a masochist to read this stuff. By the end of the first paragraph my head was hurting.

The nearest I can think of to this verbal effluvia is an explanation of medieval Tibetan theology as it related to a screen I saw in a museum -endless abstractions unrelated to any reality that I could detect.

The avoidance of discernible facts, the repeated assertion of abstractions incapable of proof or disproof, the assumptions of agreed meanings understood by the enlightened, the references to authority and the holy scriptures of Foucault et al….

This is a secular theology for those who can see the emperor’s fine clothes.

Masochism indeed! I once slogged through the entirety of a Judith Butler book. Blech! Yes, philosophy has more than its fair share of poor writing style and obscure technical jargon, but this po-mo stuff makes reading Hegel or Husserl seem like a bleedin’ picnic – and *they* actually had something substantial to say, however wrong-headed in my opinion.

Of course, I had to read the book (Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”) to have the distinct pleasure of showing exactly how and why it was completely bankrupt, intellectually and morally. But still! I’m glad the fancy with that sort of stuff passed quickly in philosophy (to the slight extent it took hold at all), and I feel genuine pity for those in literature departments and other fields where “theory” is still the order of the day.

Not too much pity, though. They dug their own grave, they can lie in it.

I actually spent some time reading this, trying desperately to wring meaning from the words. The reward is small. But I noticed a stylistic tic of this sort of writing: a love of recursion. Write corpulently about some subtopic for a while. End the paragraph pointing out how the thingum operates on or subverts … wait for it … itself!

The very identity politics and discourses of anti-repression, in other words, are often part and parcel of the dominant episteme’s “monopoly on power.”

And:

The subject, therefore, is always a becoming subject, and power is not prior to but in fact coextensive with this becoming subject. Power, in other words, is subject to its own subjects.

Can we close the circle by remembering that one of the things Butler does can be described as “pontificating?”

And, in case anyone’s wondering, I’ve never slogged through one of her books, either. The quotes I’ve read were the opposite of encouragement to do so. There are good writers out there who do have things to say, so why waste any time on a bad one who doesn’t? Just as one wouldn’t polish off a meal if the first taste smacked of poison, I do not consider it faintly possible I’m intellectually impoverished as the result of foregoing a full course of Butler. Even if science solves the “life is too short” problem, there will always be something more worthwhile to do than reading Judith Butler.

“Blech,” by the way, is a very apt word, reminding me of the Heartfield photomontage of Hitler’s windpipe filling up with coins, part of the caption to which reads (forgive if memory imperfect) “schluckt Gold und redet Blech” (swallows gold and speaks tin).

I have read both Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. I’ve actually read Gender Trouble cover to cover three times. I’m not convinced by the claim that Butler is *that* hard to understand, and in fact once you get into the flow she is *reasonably* lucid (seriously, compare her to some of the stuff Derrida and Irigaray, for example, have churned out). Some of what she says in Gender Trouble, IMO, is quite interesting (hence the multiple reads), but some of her key arguments are terribly badly thought out (as I argued in my first B&W article), and undoubtedly could have been expressed with greater clarity.

Yes…I’m willing to believe that some of what she says is quite interesting. I am and always have been actually quite interested in that whole territory – the performance of gender, etc. But I really can’t stand her style. It’s not that it’s all that hard to understand; it’s rather that it is (or at least seems to be) deliberately jargonified so as to seem more impressive. I can’t help thinking that she could perfectly well have expressed her arguments with greater clarity but she just didn’t want to. And one can see why – would she be called a superstar if she had? No. That kind of ‘superstardom’ seems to go with pseudoprofundity, even if the pseudoprofundity does go along with saying interesting and valuable things.

But I will say, I don’t think Butler writes as badly as that reviewer does!

‘I can’t help thinking that she could perfectly well have expressed her arguments with greater clarity but she just didn’t want to’.

You’re right, and this is the sad thing about Butler and her ilk. Some of what they say has value, but they *choose* to wrap it in obfuscation (of course, some of what they say is trivial and banal and the dense jargon is used to mask this). Butler must choose to write this way, as she is capable of writing in a less obscurantic fashion. See this article for example: http://www.yorku.ca/dmutimer/4260/9-11/5.4butler.html

Please, don’t get me wrong. I don’t disagree with everything Butler had to say in “Gender Trouble,” and I still think it was worth my while to slog through it. But because of the stylistic excesses and jargonization, it was a slog to read at all, let alone to read with the proper degree of charity: It was hard work to figure out what her main argument really was. Once I did figure out the argument, it was easy to show that it was not only viciously circular, but that it was in outright performative contradiction (there’s a phrase po-mo’s like that actually makes clear sense) with her own work.

And just to avoid talking in a vacuum, here’s an excerpt that is both reasonably clear and persuasively points to a real problem: “﻿Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how

sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ‘sex’ anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us?… Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the

consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.” (p.6-7)

Re-reading this passage, I’m suspicious of the use of the jargon-y term “discursive” and over-use of scare quotes, but in general I still think these are good questions that feminists need to ask: The history of science includes many examples of completely unsupported assumptions about sex and gender being smuggled in as given facts, without question and with only the flimsiest of empirical foundations, if any.

But then Butler produces prose like the following: “﻿The object of repression is not the desire it takes to be its ostensible object, but the multiple configurations of power itself, the very plurality of which would displace the seeming universality and necessity of the juridical or repressive law. In other words, desire and its repression are an occasion for the consolidation of juridical structures; desire is manufactured and forbidden as a ritual symbolic gesture whereby the juridical model exercises and consolidates its own power.” (p.75-6)

Within the context of her book, one can (with some effort) make out the meaning of this. But I picked out this passage because it was the *clearest* explanation of this central idea. And it’s still stylistic drek, absolutely polluted with awful and unnecessary jargon and catch-phrases. Whole pages of much, much worse prose were the price I paid to figure out what she was saying that actually made sense, and what her real argument was (which I ultimately discovered wasn’t very sensible at all).

It’s the sort of thing I think was worth doing… ONCE! Now I don’t need to do it again – because once exposed, I can spot the same bad arguments quickly, without digging through all the nonsense.

Wandering somewhat from the main topic, here is a quote from DG Leahy’s Foundation: Matter the Body Itself (SUNY Press):

—

This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self.

Of course, the association of legitimate discursive analysis with pornography here shows the always-already juridical manifestation of absolutist power relations vis-a-vis gendered representational strategies in an environment of the unequivocal (and indeed, univocal) ultra-masculinist power structure of “academic discourse” discourse.

*giggle*

I don’t know that I’d go so far as SEXUAL excitement, but it is kinda fun!

Does anyone ever defend this sort (i.e. Butlerian) of discourse? er, I mean language. I hear plenty people attacking but no one — maybe it’s the crowd in which I travel — explaining why it is essential.

I have heard defenses of it, David. The tack the defenders usually take is that Butler’s (or Irigaray’s or Kristeva’s or Derrida’s…) ideas are just too fluid and subtle to be captured in clear, straightforward prose. Clarity = superficiality. Also, clarity and succinctness promote exactly the sort of imperialistic mindset the pomos are working so hard (in their sly, subversive way) to combat. Those who write this way seem to believe they’re wonderfully combining the playfulness of Nietzsche (all those awful puns) with the impressive thoroughness of Heidegger or Hegel.

David, oh yeah, I’ve heard and read defenses of Butlerian writing. And in any case, people go on perpetrating the stuff, witness this review under discussion, so that constitutes an implicit defense, don’t you think?